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Perhaps the hate of this school for the corporeal is due to
their reading of Plato who inveighs against body as a grave
hindrance to Soul and pronounces the corporeal to be
characteristically the inferior.
Then let them for the moment pass over the corporeal element in
the Universe and study all that still remains.
They will think of the Intellectual Sphere which includes within
itself the Ideal-Form realized in the Kosmos. They will think of
the Souls, in their ordered rank, that produce incorporeal
magnitude and lead the Intelligible out towards spatial
extension, so that finally the thing of process becomes, by its
magnitude, as adequate a representation as possible of the
principle void of parts which is its model- the greatness of
power there being translated here into greatness of bulk. Then
whether they think of the Kosmic Sphere [the All-Soul] as already
in movement under the guidance of that power of God which holds
it through and through, beginning and middle and end, or whether
they consider it as in rest and exercising as yet no outer
governance: either approach will lead to a true appreciation of
the Soul that conducts this Universe.
Now let them set body within it- not in the sense that Soul
suffers any change but that, since "In the Gods there can be no
grudging," it gives to its inferior all that any partial thing
has strength to receive and at once their conception of the
Kosmos must be revised; they cannot deny that the Soul of the
Kosmos has exercised such a weight of power as to have brought
the corporeal-principle, in itself unlovely, to partake of good
and beauty to the utmost of its receptivity- and to a pitch which
stirs Souls, beings of the divine order.
These people may no doubt say that they themselves feel no such
stirring, and that they see no difference between beautiful and
ugly forms of body; but, at that, they can make no distinction
between the ugly and the beautiful in conduct; sciences can have
no beauty; there can be none in thought; and none, therefore, in
God. This world descends from the Firsts: if this world has no
beauty, neither has its Source; springing thence, this world,
too, must have its beautiful things. And while they proclaim
their contempt for earthly beauty, they would do well to ignore
that of youths and women so as not to be overcome by
incontinence.
In fine, we must consider that their self-satisfaction could not
turn upon a contempt for anything indisputably base; theirs is
the perverse pride of despising what was once admired.
We must always keep in mind that the beauty in a partial thing
cannot be identical with that in a whole; nor can any several
objects be as stately as the total.
And we must recognize, that, even in the world of sense and part,
there are things of a loveliness comparable to that of the
Celestials- forms whose beauty must fill us with veneration for
their creator and convince us of their origin in the divine,
forms which show how ineffable is the beauty of the Supreme since
they cannot hold us but we must, though in all admiration, leave
these for those. Further, wherever there is interior beauty, we
may be sure that inner and outer correspond; where the interior
is vile, all is brought low by that flaw in the dominants.
Nothing base within can be beautiful without- at least not with
an authentic beauty, for there are examples of a good exterior
not sprung from a beauty dominant within; people passing as
handsome but essentially base have that, a spurious and
superficial beauty: if anyone tells me he has seen people really
fine-looking but interiorly vile, I can only deny it; we have
here simply a false notion of personal beauty; unless, indeed,
the inner vileness were an accident in a nature essentially fine;
in this Sphere there are many obstacles to self-realization.
In any case the All is beautiful, and there can be no obstacle to
its inner goodness: where the nature of a thing does not comport
perfection from the beginning, there may be a failure in complete
expression; there may even be a fall to vileness, but the All
never knew a childlike immaturity; it never experienced a
progress bringing novelty into it; it never had bodily growth:
there was nowhere from whence it could take such increment; it
was always the All-Container.
And even for its Soul no one could imagine any such a path of
process: or, if this were conceded, certainly it could not be
towards evil.
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